The Long Road to Diablo 4 is Paved with More Diablo 3

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And that’s a good thing.

By Kosta Andreadis

Like many hardcore Diablo fans, I was hoping for an announcement related to Diablo 4 at this year’s BlizzCon. In fact, I almost expected it. Over the course of 2016 we’d seen a handful of Blizzard job listings around an “unannounced project” related to Diablo, and leading up to the show, things had been quiet on the Diablo 3 front – unusually so for a game that has had a steady stream of updates since Reaper of Souls was released more than two years ago. And to cap it all off, this year is the series’ 20th anniversary. Perfect timing, right?

It wasn’t to be. Diablo 4: Dream Warriors wasn’t announced, but the show did play host to a string of announcements related to Diablo 3, and in a strange turn of events, I actually think that this is the best-case scenario for how things could have turned out. Like that family in that film that couldn’t afford Christmas presents, I’ve realised that what I was looking for was right here all along. My humble copy of Diablo 3.

With these changes, Diablo 3, a game that has already gone from strength to strength since the release of Reaper of Souls, is now on the cusp of entering Paragon 700 Barbarian territory*, so let’s run through the three big additions that will keep this game fresh through 2017.

Party Like it’s 1996

We might be living in the age of remakes and HD re-releases, but by Blizzard’s own admission, the mechanics, pacing, and content of some of the studio’s earliest efforts haven’t necessarily aged as gracefully as one might hope. To re-release Warcraft: Orcs and Humans (1994) or Diablo (1996) in HD in 2017 would be antithetical to how Blizzard approaches game development. Sure, the studio’s library is full of sequels and numerical instalments and franchise offshoots, but each new game builds significantly on what has come before, making the earliest games a big step back by modern standards.

On the other hand, the value that we place on nostalgia, especially for games we played during our formative years, is hard to ignore. 20 years of Diablo is a big deal, so Blizzard has decided to celebrate the original in a way that both honours it and modernises it. What we’re getting, in other words, are the dungeons from the original Diablo (1996) recreated in Diablo 3. And by utilising existing Diablo 3 combat mechanics alongside retro-inspired visuals and sound effects, I can’t help but think that this is the right kind of throw-back.

Exit Theatre Mode

“It was a fun journey,” Diablo 3’s Senior Producer Julia Humphreys tells me. “One of the challenges was that we already had so much nostalgic throw-back content in Diablo 3 to begin with, and there were already quite a few one-to-one comparisons. In terms of the environments that we were using, to the monsters, and even many of the bosses – including the Butcher, Skeleton King, which were all in the original Diablo. So, for this to work we needed to do a lot of things like re-skin the bosses, and then re-do monster AI and animation to more closely represent what they felt like in the original game. But as there was so much raw content to build off to bring Diablo 1 over, it made sense to do it.”

The whole endeavour was treated as a way for the team to not only give back to the community, but to also celebrate the origins of the franchise. And the best part is that it will be a free event that will run throughout the month of January.

The Necromancer is Back from the Dead

You might be of the mind that what Diablo 3 needs right now is a new expansion; another Reaper of Souls. But I don't think that's the case. In its current state Diablo 3 is essentially feature complete, and whether you play it for a few dozen hours or a few hundred, the experience has grown with each patch and bit of content to the point where it’s arguably the best action RPG ever made. Right now, this game is a temple of streamlined controls and skill-use that continuously rewards players with new build options and subtle variations. An expansion in the traditional sense, then, where level caps are raised, new story content and character classes are added, and all items and sets and other bits of gear are reset, would fundamentally change the game as we know it today. Maybe even destroy it.

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Even in an early state the Necromancer is a fun class to play, with a clear focus placed on blood magic, gore, and using an army of skeletons to deal with hordes of monsters.

An expansion may be a bad idea, but adding a new class isn’t and there’s one particular protagonist that fans have been asking for since Diablo 3 was first announced way back when - the Necromancer. Now that it’s coming to the game in 2017 I couldn’t be happier. One of the best things about the new class is that the Necromancer is being designed for Diablo 3 as the game exists today and not as it existed a few years ago. Still early on in development, the work that’s currently being carried out with the Diablo 3 Necromancer is to find the right feel. “At the moment we’re still focusing on the class itself,” Diablo 3 Senior Game Designer Matthew Berger explains, “And that means all the skills and the runes that are going to go with them. Because once you’ve identified all the skills and the runes and the specific types of gameplay that you want, that’s when you can break it, expand it, and overpower it with sets that are going to take advantage of this skill or that skill or this combination.”

Even in an early state the Necromancer is a fun class to play, with a clear focus placed on blood magic, gore, and using an army of skeletons to deal with hordes of monsters. And although that may sound gruesome to those that haven’t played the game (also, how are you enjoying this article so far?), as a series Diablo has always struck the right balance between the dark and the disturbing and the fun. That means that even though the Necromancer utilises fresh corpses as IEDs to take out groups of hideous beasts, it’s really just a lot of fun to have an army of the dead at your disposal.

Bringing the joy of Corpse Explosion to Diablo 3.

Zoning Out in Adventure Mode

Okay, so let’s backtrack a bit to the whole no new expansion thing. Perhaps the only negative part of not having another Reaper of Souls-style expansion is that we won’t get a new Act to explore, or linear Diablo story to experience. Since the release of Reaper of Souls, most Diablo players spend their time in Adventure Mode where access to Bounties and Rifts provide the bulk of the end-game content. With subsequent content patches, new Adventure Zones have been added, which are essentially new environments to explore, equipped with new monster types to deal with.

Of course, it doesn’t stop there. Things like Legendary Gems and Kanai’s Cube has meant the Diablo 3 end-game has changed and evolved over the years. And always for the better. The secret it seems, lies with a design philosophy that sounds like it probably shouldn’t work. “One of the great things about having Adventure Mode,” Matthew Berger explains, “is that you’re never really breaking it as much as you’re simply adding a new dimension. Adventure Mode is a wonderful framework in which to build and add new features, some of them big and some of them much smaller. There is a philosophy that everything doesn’t need to be balanced and things should be overpowered. What’s important is that everybody has a good time, everyone is enjoying the class that they’re playing, and everyone feels that the class that they’re playing can deliver on the fantasy and whatever content they want to explore. So, whenever we add a new feature - like Kanai’s Cube for example - if the answer is yes to ‘is it too strong?’ then that’s a good sign. If the answer is yes to ‘is it too strong for everybody?’ then that’s a great sign.”

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Several quality of life changes are coming, from turning the management of crafting materials into a currency-style system to something called the Armory, which lets you swap out builds with a single press of a button.

Needless to say, we’re getting new zones next year. And possibly another Kanai’s Cube-style update, though Blizzard wasn’t willing to shed any light on what that might entail. But in terms of the new areas being added, they’ll be more substantial than the ones we’ve seen in the past. “People love going through the story,” Michael adds. “So we’re asking ourselves how can we deliver narrative in this new context, and how can we push what we did with Greyhollow Island [the last adventure zone added] even further.”

Several quality of life changes are also coming, from turning the management of crafting materials into a currency-style system to something called the Armory, which lets you swap out builds with a single press of a button. The team at Blizzard are placing a lot of focus on Diablo 3’s endgame, with a vision almost entirely devoted to Adventure Mode and the Rift system and giving players what they want. Challenge Rifts, which introduce a new arcade-like time trial mode to the game, sound particularly cool. The way they work is that Blizzard curates and captures specific Greater Rift runs from players and then open them up for everyone to compete for the best times - using the same character build and gear setup.

And to fully cement Blizzard’s commitment to providing the same content across all formats, Seasons are also headed to the console versions of Diablo 3 in 2017.

Suit up.

The Long Road

It’s really not surprising that Diablo 4 wasn’t announced at BlizzCon given how much life Diablo 3 evidently still has left. And in casual chats that I had with a few Blizzard employees at this year’s show, I got the impression that the studio was very much shifting its focus to only discussing the near future. It makes sense. Every one of Blizzard’s games and franchises is a living and breathing thing. From Overwatch to StarCraft II to Hearthstone to Heroes of the Storm, continual updates, tweaks, balance changes, and new bits of content are being added regularly, keeping the player base engaged. Why put the focus on a future Diablo game when there are bloody wars to be waged right now?

Exit Theatre Mode

Diablo 4 is almost certainly in development, of course, but likely won’t be announced until the finish line is in sight. That approach worked for Overwatch, which was announced, went into beta, and was subsequently released in the space of 18 months, and kept players hooked every step of the way. The long and windy road that we’re on will eventually lead us to Diablo 4: The Wrath of Cain, but it’s great to know that it will be paved with more Diablo 3.

*Once you hit a high enough Paragon level, all you can do as a Barbarian is add more points into your base stat - Strength. Which is a riff on the whole strength to strength remark from earlier in the sentence. Ahem. To anyone who got this reference first time around, get in touch, we should probably start a support group of some kind.